A police car and a police tent are positioned outside the gates of the house of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky in Sunningdale near Ascot in Berkshire earlier this year. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Around 30 mourners including family, friends and his British lawyers attended the funeral which was held amid tight security in Brookwood cemetery near Woking, Surrey. The service took place in a small brick chapel, overlooked by suitably Russian pines and silver birches, and under a dull, overcast sky.

One guest arrived in a sleek Bentley. There were several Mercedes. But others dressed in black and bearing lillies arrived on a modest suburban train to Brookwood station. Berezovsky's close friend Akhmed Zakayev, the London-based Chechen separatist leader, was there with his son. The oligarch's daughter Elizaveta and five other children attended, bringing flowers.

Overall, though, it was a strikingly understated send-off for a man who lived furiously in the public eye, both in Russia and in the UK, his home since 2000. At the time of his death Berezovsky had spent more than a decade waging a high-profile media battle against his one-time protege Vladimir Putin. Berezovsky's relatives had originally planned to hold the funeral on Monday, but switched the day and the venue to dodge Russia's pro-Putin state media, and to wait for an Orthodox priest to fly in from Moscow.

"He was a friend. I miss him. I'm very grateful to Boris. Through him I felt the touch of history," Berezovsky's close friend Alex Goldfarb said. Goldfarb said Berezovsky played a defining role in Russia's turbulent post-communist 1990s, when the oligarch was a key figure in Boris Yeltsin's court, and promoted the little-known Putin as Yeltsin's successor: "He was responsible for Yeltsin, and then for peace in Chechnya [after the 1994-1996 Chechen war] and then for Putin and then for anti-Putin," Goldfarb said.

Berezovsky's body was found on 23 March at his ex-wife Galina's home in Ascot. He was 67. He had been living there after legal bills forced him to sell his own luxury Wentworth home. Detectives have said they believe Berezovsky killed himself. A preliminary inquest heard a ligature was found around his neck. Friends admit he was depressed and demoralised after losing his $5bn high court litigation battle last autumn against Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, a crushing defeat that wiped him out financially, and left him reeling emotionally. Some, however, are convinced he was murdered.

One mourner at Brookwood cemetery, who declined to be named, described Berezovsky as "very Russian, like something from the pages of a Dostoyevsky novel." Others refused to talk. Berezovky's full inquest has yet to be held. An inquest into the death of Alexander Litvinenko – Berezovsky's close friend – is continuing, amid government attempts to keep evidence in the case secret.